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Thursday, July 31, 2014

Editor’s Note: Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian, states that the Israeli government stands convicted of perpetrating “incremental genocide” of the Palestinian people through episodic massacres such as Operation Cast Lead (December 2008 - January 2009) and the latest round of mass murder which began earlier this month as part of Operation Protective Edge. The Israelis themselves have coined cold-blooded euphemisms for their cycle of massacres: “mowing the lawn;” “mowing the grass."

In 2004, a year before Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip, Dov Weissglass, éminence grise to Ariel Sharon, explained the initiative’s purpose to an interviewer from Haaretz:

"The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process … And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with … a [US] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress … The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."

In 2006 Dov Weissglass was just as frank about Israel’s policy towards Gaza’s 1.8 million inhabitants: "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger."

He was not speaking metaphorically: it later emerged that the Israeli defense ministry had conducted detailed research on how to translate his vision into reality, and arrived at a figure of 2279 calories per person per day – some 8 per cent less than a previous calculation because the research team had originally neglected to account for ‘culture and experience’ in determining nutritional ‘red lines’.

This wasn’t an academic exercise. After pursuing a policy of enforced integration between 1967 and the late 1980s, Israeli policy shifted towards separation during the 1987-93 uprising, and then fragmentation during the Oslo years. For the Gaza Strip, an area about the size of Greater Glasgow (Scotland), these changes entailed a gradual severance from the outside world, with the movement of persons and goods into and out of the territory increasingly restricted.

The screws were turned tighter during the 2000-5 uprising, and in 2007 the Gaza Strip was effectively sealed shut. All exports were banned, and just 131 truckloads of foodstuffs and other essential products were permitted entry per day. Israel also strictly controlled which products could and could not be imported. Prohibited items have included A4 paper, chocolate, coriander, crayons, jam, pasta, shampoo, shoes and wheelchairs.

In 2010, commenting on this premeditated and systematic degradation of the humanity of an entire population, David Cameron characterised the Gaza Strip as a ‘prison camp’ and – for once – did not neuter this assessment by subordinating his criticism to proclamations about the jailers’ right of self-defense against their inmates.

It’s often claimed that Israel’s reason for escalating this punitive regime to a new level of severity was to cause the overthrow of Hamas after its 2007 seizure of power in Gaza. The claim doesn’t stand up to serious scrutiny. Removing Hamas from power has indeed been a policy objective for the US and the EU ever since the Islamist movement won the 2006 parliamentary elections, and their combined efforts to undermine it helped set the stage for the ensuing Palestinian schism.

Israel’s agenda has been different. Had it been determined to end Hamas rule it could easily have done so, particularly while Hamas was still consolidating its control over Gaza in 2007, and without necessarily reversing the 2005 disengagement. Instead, it saw the schism between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority as an opportunity to further its policies of separation and fragmentation, and to deflect growing international pressure for an end to an occupation that has lasted nearly half a century.

Its massive assaults on the Gaza Strip in 2008-9 (Operation Cast Lead) and 2012 (Operation Pillar of Defense), as well as countless individual attacks between and since, were in this context exercises in what the Israeli military called "mowing the lawn": weakening Hamas and enhancing Israel’s powers of deterrence. As the 2009 Goldstone Report and other investigations have demonstrated, often in excruciating detail, the “grass" consists overwhelmingly of non-combatant Palestinian civilians, indiscriminately targeted by Israel’s precision weaponry.

Israel’s current assault on the Gaza Strip began on July 6 with ground forces moving in some ten days later, is intended to serve the same agenda. The conditions for it were set in late April. Negotiations that had been going on for nine months stalled after the Israeli government reneged on its commitment to release a number of Palestinian prisoners incarcerated since before the 1993 Oslo Accords, and ended when Netanyahu announced he would no longer deal with Mahmoud Abbas because Abbas had just signed a further reconciliation agreement with Hamas.

On this occasion, in a sharp departure from precedent, US Secretary of State John Kerry explicitly blamed Israel for the breakdown in talks. His special envoy, Martin Indyk, a career Israel lobbyist, blamed Israel’s insatiable appetite for Palestinian land and continued expansion of the settlements, and handed in his resignation.

The challenge this poses to Netanyahu is clear. If even the Americans are telling the world that Israel is not interested in peace, those more directly invested in a two-state settlement – such as the EU, which has started to exclude any Israeli entities active in occupied Palestinian territory from participation in bilateral agreements – may start considering other ways to nudge Israel towards the 1967 boundaries.

Negotiations about nothing are designed to provide political cover for Israel’s policy of creeping annexation. Now that they’ve collapsed yet again, the strategic asset that is American public opinion may start asking why Congress is more loyal to Netanyahu than the Israeli Knesset is. Kerry had been serious about reaching a comprehensive agreement: he adopted almost all of Israel’s core positions and successfully rammed most of them down Abbas’s throat – yet Netanyahu still balked. Refusing even to specify future Israeli-Palestinian borders during nine months of negotiations, Israeli leaders instead levelled a series of accusations at Washington so outlandish – encouraging extremism, giving succour to terrorists – that one could be forgiven for concluding Congress was funding Hamas, rather than Israel, to the tune of $3 billion a year.

Israel received another blow on 2 June, when a new Palestinian Authority government was inaugurated, following the April reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Fatah. Hamas endorsed the new government even though it was given no cabinet posts and the government’s composition and political program were virtually indistinguishable from its predecessor’s. With barely a protest from the Islamists, Abbas repeatedly and loudly proclaimed that the government accepted the Middle East Quartet’s demands: that it recognize Israel, renounce violence and adhere to past agreements.

Abbas also announced that Palestinian security forces in the West Bank would continue their security collaboration with Israel. When both Washington and Brussels signalled their intention to co-operate with the new government, alarm bells went off in Israel. Its usual assertions that Palestinian negotiators spoke only for themselves – and would therefore prove incapable of implementing any agreement – had begun to look shaky: the Palestinian leadership could now claim not only to represent both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but also to have co-opted Hamas into supporting a negotiated two-state settlement, if not the Oslo framework as a whole. There might soon be increased international pressure on Israel to negotiate seriously with Abbas. The “formaldehyde" was beginning to evaporate.

At this point Netanyahu seized on the 12 June disappearance of three young Israelis in the West Bank like a drowning man thrown a lifebelt. Despite clear evidence presented to him by the Israeli security forces that the three teenagers were already dead, and no evidence to date that Hamas was involved, he held Hamas directly responsible and launched a ‘hostage rescue operation’ throughout the West Bank. It was really an organised military rampage. It included the killing of at least six Palestinians, none of whom was accused of involvement in the disappearances; mass arrests, including the arrest of Hamas parliamentarians and the re-arrest of detainees released in 2011; the demolition of a number of houses and the looting of others; and a variety of other depredations of the kind Israel’s finest have honed to perfection during decades of occupation. Netanyahu whipped up a demagogic firestorm against the Palestinians, and the subsequent abduction and burning alive of a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem cannot and should not be separated from this incitement.

For his part, Abbas failed to stand up to the Israeli operation and ordered his security forces to continue to co-operate with Israel against Hamas. The reconciliation agreement was being put under serious pressure. On the night of July 6, an Israeli air raid resulted in the death of seven Hamas militants. Hamas responded with rocket attacks deep into Israel, escalating further as Israel launched its full-scale onslaught. For the past year Hamas had been in a precarious position: it had lost its headquarters in Damascus and preferential status in Iran as a result of its refusal to give open support to the Syrian regime, and faced unprecedented levels of hostility from Egypt’s new military ruler. The underground tunnel economy between Egypt and Gaza had been systematically dismantled by the Egyptians, and for the first time since seizing control of the territory in 2007 it was no longer able regularly to pay the salaries of tens of thousands of government employees. The reconciliation agreement with Fatah was its way of bartering its political program in exchange for its own survival: in return for conceding the political arena to Abbas, Hamas would retain control of the Gaza Strip indefinitely, have its public sector placed on the PA payroll and see the border crossing with Egypt reopened.

In the event, the quid pro quo Hamas hoped for was not permitted to materialize and, according to Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group, ‘life in Gaza became worse’: ‘The current escalation,’ he wrote, ‘is a direct result of the choice by Israel and the West to obstruct the implementation of the April 2014 Palestinian reconciliation agreement.’ To put it differently, those within Hamas who saw the crisis as an opportunity to put an end to Weissglass’s regime gained the upper hand. So far, they appear to have the majority of the population with them, because they seem to prefer death by F-16 to death by formaldehyde.

Among all the sanctimonious howls – this time including a lily-livered Cameron’s – about Israel’s right to self-defense, and in the face of the categorical rejection of the Palestinians’ equivalent right, the fundamental point that this is an illegitimate attack is often lost. As the lawyer Noura Erakat has cogently argued, ‘Israel does not have the right to self-defense in international law against occupied Palestinian territory.’ Its argument that it no longer occupies the Gaza Strip has been dismissed by Lisa Hajjar of the University of California as a self-generated ‘licence to kill.’ Once again, Israel is ‘mowing the lawn’ with impunity, targeting civilian non-combatants and civilian infrastructure. Given its continual insistence that it uses the most precise weapons available and chooses its targets carefully, it is impossible to conclude that the targeting is not deliberate.

According to UN agencies, more than three-quarters of the more than 260 Palestinians killed so far (July 18) have been civilians, and more than a quarter of them children. Most were targeted in their own homes: they cannot be described as collateral damage under any definition of the term. Of course Palestinian militants have also been recklessly targeting Israeli population centers, though their attacks have resulted in just a single death: a man handing out sweets to the soldiers pulverising the Gaza Strip. Human Rights Watch has criticised both sides but, true to form, has accused only the Palestinians of war crimes.

A Palestinian father mourns his son who was killed Aug. 3 in the Israeli bombing of a United Nation shelter for civilians in Rafah.Ten Palestinians were killed and dozens seriously wounded at a UN Relief and Works Agency shelter for 3,000 Palestinians in Rafah in southern Gaza, on Sunday, August 3, 2014. The coordinates of the school, like all UN facilities in Gaza, were repeatedly communicated to the Israeli military before the attack.
_________________U.N. says Israel violated international law, after Israelis bomb a school in Gaza

GAZA CITY, July 30, 2014 — United Nations officials accused Israel of violating international law after artillery shells slammed into a school overflowing with evacuees Wednesday, an attack that Palestinian and U.N. officials said killed at least 20 people and wounded dozens as they slept.

It was one of the worst mass-casualty incidents of the 24 days of the mass murder of Palestinians. The building was the sixth U.N. school in the Gaza Strip to be rocked by explosions during Operation Protective Edge,” which began July 6.

Israeli officials said they were trying to determine who was responsible for the bloodshed. In past incidents, the Israeli military blamed errant rocket or mortar fire by Gaza militants for explosions at U.N. schools — or said the blasts were under investigation.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which operated the school-turned-shelter in the Jabalya refugee camp, said it had gathered evidence, analyzed bomb fragments and examined craters after the attack. Its initial assessment was that three Israeli artillery shells hit the school where 3,300 people had sought refuge.

“I condemn in the strongest possible terms this serious violation of international law by Israeli forces,” said Pierre Krähenbühl, the UNRWA commissioner-general. “This is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame. Today the world stands disgraced.”

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said “all available evidence points to Israeli artillery as the cause” of the pre-dawn attack. Ban said Israel had received the precise GPS coordinates of the school from the United Nations 17 times.

The Israeli military announced a brief humanitarian cease-fire in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday evening. The pause in hostilities would not apply to areas in which the military is operating, it said.

A Hamas spokesman dismissed the lull as a “media stunt” that would not allow rescue workers to recover casualties in combat zones that Israel was excluding from the cease-fire.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a senior spokesman for the Israeli military, called the shelling of the U.N. school “a true tragedy,” and said the incident is under investigation. “There was mortar fire in the area, directed at our troops,” he said. “There was an exchange of fire. We have yet to determine if it was Israeli munitions that struck the compound.”

One of the survivors said she had no doubt who was at fault for the barrage. “There were five shells, one after the other. We were a clear target,” said Hannah Sweilem, 33, who was in the shelter with her husband and eight children. “If the Israelis say it was a mistake, they are lying.”

Witnesses at the Jabalya Primary School for Girls said the Israeli bombing July 30 struck a classroom where about 50 people, mostly women and children, were sleeping. The room’s roof was ripped apart. Most of the dead, however, were young men who had woken for the traditional Muslim dawn prayer, said Moen al-Masr, a doctor at the Kamal Odwan hospital. Said Allah al-Bes, 33, who was seeking refuge at the school with his wife and three sons: “We found people torn to pieces. It was like hell.” Bes and his family went to the U.N. facility after an earlier attack on a U.N.-run school in Beit Hanoun. “We have learned no place is safe in Gaza,” he said.

The Israeli terror attack on the other U.N. Relief Works Agency shelter, inside a school in the northern Gaza city of Beit Hanoun on July 24, killed 16 Palestinian civilians. U.N. agency administrators said on July 25 that they had made urgent pleas -- sending their coordinates 12 times -- asking the Israeli military to hold their fire. Israelis liars said that only one errant mortar struck the school that day, when the courtyard was empty. Corporate US media surmised that errant Hamas rockets did the damage. But according to the Wall Street Journal (Saturday July 26, 2014 p. A8): "Weapons experts who reviewed photographs of shrapnel recovered from the bodies of of victims said they didn't match those produced by rockets, and were consistent with mortar fire from tanks. The high number of casualties suggested a more sophisticated weapon than Hamas's unguided rockets, these experts said."

Gaza Health Ministry officials said that more than 105 people were killed in Israeli bombing, shelling and missile strikes July 30 and that more than 400 were injured as Israelis pressed ahead with their escalated campaign against the coastal enclave. Satellite images released by the United Nations show the impact of Israeli strikes on structures in Gaza. One of the most ravaged areas is the Shijaiyah neighborhood in the southeastern part of Gaza City.

Timeline of Israeli Terrorism Against the United Nations

In 1948, United Nations diplomat Count Folke-Bernadotte of Sweden was assigned by the U.N. with the mission of bringing peace to Palestine. Sitting in the back seat of a Chrysler sedan on Sept. 17 were the UN negotiator and Colonel André Serot, a decorated French hero of two world wars. Their vehicle, the last of a three-car convoy, started its ascent up a narrow road in Jerusalem. It was at that moment, that Yehoshua Cohen, a member of a hit squad, emerged. Journalist Donald MacIntyre describes what happened next, as Cohen: "ran to the Chrysler, pushed the barrel of his German-made Schmeisser MP40 sub-machine gun through the open rear window, and pumped six bullets into the chest, throat and left arm of the aristocrat, and another eighteen bullets into the body of the French colonel sitting on his left." This assassination of the United Nations' top diplomat was perpetrated by Judaic terrorists disguised as Israeli soldiers. The assassination was carried out by the Stern Gang. The murders were ordered by the Stern Gang's triumvirate, which included future Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. In New York on October 3, 1984, Shamir, who was at that time Israeli Foreign Minister, received a warm welcome from the U.N. and addressed the General Assembly.In 1996, Israelis shelled a UN compound in Qana, Southern Lebanon - which it had occupied since 1982 - killing more than 100 civilians. The UN report on the massacre concluded that it had to have been deliberate.

In 2002, during Ariel Sharon's mauling of the West Bank, Israelis repeatedly struck UN ambulances. The commissioner-general of UNRWA stated that the Israelis deliberately targeted the ambulances.

In 2006, during the most recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli military bombed a well-marked, well-known UN observation post, killing UN personnel. “Israel" offered a wry shrug of the shoulders: accidents happen, innocent people get killed, what a tragedy. The UN determined that the Israeli bombing was deliberate murder of their people.

The UN has never brought war crimes charges or sanctions against “Israel” for the assassination or these massacres.

Israeli UN ambassadors walk out whenever an Iranian leader is scheduled to speak at the UN, in order to demonstrate "Israeli indignation" at these supposed Iranian "moral lepers." As part of their theatre of superior Judaic ethics, the Israelis are allowed to pose at UN meetings as paragons of morality, and when they do so the western media do not contradict their play-acting by reminding the public of Israeli crimes against the UN. Instead, the media develop a case of amnesia concerning the 1948 assassinations and the more recent massacres which the Israelis have perpetrated against United Nations employees and the Arab civilians they shelter in their facilities. As former Israeli President Shimon Peres has stated, “No one will judge Israel!”

In a statement released earlier Wednesday, U.N.R.W.A. commissioner-general Pierre Krähenbühl said U.N. schools had been struck six times during the present conflict, and that the attack on Jabalia Elementary Girls School appears to have been executed with “Israeli artillery.”

As is the case in other attacks on U.N. sites, Krähenbühl said the Israel Defense Forces had been given the location of the shelter (in Jabalia’s case, the agency said it warned the I.D.F. 17 times).

“We have moved beyond the realm of humanitarian action alone,” Krähenbühl said. “We are in the realm of accountability. I call on the international community to take deliberate international political action to put an immediate end to the continuing carnage.”

At least nine Gaza hospitals have also been attacked by the Israelis, and an Israeli bombing of a crowded market killed an additional 15 Palestinians on July 30.

A United States defense official told CNN network news Pentagon sends ammunition to of plans to further supply Israel with ammunition, reportedly from American stockpiles within the nation. The Pentagon later said it had granted an Israeli request for ammunition, including some from a stockpile stored by the US military on the ground in Israel for emergency use by the Judaic state, which needs the ammo to massacre many hundreds more of Palestinian civilians.

The US Congress and “Right wing Radio” and TV applaud the massacre of Palestinian civilians and blame it on the victims. Palestinians are not “Jews,” so they can be mass-murdered without fear of the consequences or a holocaust museum to commemorate their deaths. Those type of elaborate memorials are reserved for The Holy People and allied master races.

July 29: A Palestinian firefighter tried to put out a fire at Gaza's main civilian power plant, which was bombed by the Israelis overnight, as part of Binyamin Netanyahu's “Operation Protective Edge.”

The destruction of the power plant threatened to create a humanitarian crisis. The facility powers Palestinian water and sewage systems as well as hospitals, and it had been Gaza’s main source of electricity. Rafiq Maliha, director of Gaza’s power plant, said it would likely take “months or a year” to repair it.

In Gaza City, the streets were nearly empty Tuesday, July 29. Most shops were shuttered as civilians hunkered down after what residents described as a night of terror, with flares fired by Israeli forces constantly lighting up the sky, and explosions resounding across the area. In the Al Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, an airstrike from an F-16 killed the mayor, Anis Abu Shamala, and four others in his home, some of whom had taken refuge there from intense artillery shelling nearby, witnesses said. In Khan Younis, 17 members of the Najjar family, which lost 21 people in a previous Israeli terror bombing, were killed in the latest one. These people are not Judaic. The Talmudic mentality, which has captured the soul of the West, will not mourn them.

Palestinian civilians can be butchered like sheep or cattle, a thousand or two thousand Palestinians — or as many as the Israelis choose to slaughter — and the Congress of the United States will continue to applaud and send taxpayer money to kill more.

This bald moral deparavity is summed up in the oft-heard phrase in the American media, “Israel’s right to self-defense.” The idea that the Palestinians have the same right has never occurred to them. Palestinians are mere goyim. They are not the Talmudically certified Holy People who suffered the Holocaust of the 64 Million.

Israelis have killed a Palestinian Christian in Gaza. Will Protestant Fundamentalists in the USA protest her death?

Israelis want Christians out:

Mrs. Ayyad’s husband, George Ayyad, dismissed the idea that her death would force more of the Christian population out of Gaza: "If we leave, that's what the Israelis want.” News Media Bias: If Hamas had done this instead of the Israelis, Jalila Ayyad's funeral would have been broadcast on every TV news channel in the USA.

1,139 Palestinians ("most of them civilians” — NY Times, July 27), have been killed in Gaza by Israelis as of July 26, 2014.

...In Gaza today we find ways of justifying the bombing of hospitals, the annihilation of families at dinner, the killing of pre-adolescents playing soccer on a beach.

In Israel-Palestine the powerful party has succeeded in painting itself as the victim, while the ones being killed and maimed become the perpetrators. “They don’t care about life,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, abetted by Obama and Harper (Canadian Prime Minister), “we do.”

Netanyahu, you who with surgical precision slaughter innocents, the young and the old, you who have cruelly blockaded Gaza for years, starving it of necessities, you who deprive Palestinians of more and more of their land, their water, their crops, their trees — you care about life?

There is no understanding Gaza out of context — Hamas rockets or unjustifiable terrorist attacks on civilians — and that context is the longest ongoing ethnic cleansing operation in the recent and present centuries, the ongoing attempt to destroy Palestinian nationhood.

The Palestinians use tunnels? So did my heroes, the poorly armed anti-Nazi fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Unlike Israel, Palestinians lack Apache helicopters, guided drones, jet fighters with bombs, laser-guided artillery. Out of impotent defiance, they fire inept rockets, causing terror for innocent Israelis but rarely physical harm. With such a gross imbalance of power, there is no equivalence of culpability.

Israel wants peace? Perhaps, but as the veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has pointed out, it does not want a just peace. Occupation and creeping annexation, an inhumane blockade, the destruction of olive groves, the arbitrary imprisonment of thousands, torture, daily humiliation of civilians, house demolitions: these are not policies compatible with any desire for a just peace. In Tel Aviv Gideon Levy now moves around with a bodyguard, the price of speaking the truth...

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Dov Lior, a racist Israeli rabbi from the West Bank settlement Kiryat Arba, recently posted a Halakhic ruling allowing to kill innocent civilians, after being asked about the “war” (it’s a massacre) in Gaza.

Here are a few lines from the ruling (pictured below):

“The Torah of Israel guides us in all walks of life, private and public, on how to behave during war and also how to keep moral standards.

The Maharal from Prague (Rabbi Judah Loew), in his book Gur Arye, clearly writes that… in all wars the attacked people are allowed to attack fiercely the people from whom the attackers came from and they do not have to check if he personally belongs to the fighters.

Therefore, during war the attacked people are allowed to punish the enemy population in any punishment it finds worthy, such as denying supplies or electricity and also to bomb the whole area according to the discretion of the army minister and not to just simply endanger soldier’s lives but to take crushing deterrence steps to exterminate the enemy.

In the case of Gaza, the Minister of Defense will be allowed to instruct even the destruction of Gaza so that the south will no longer suffer and to avoid harm to our people who have been suffering for so long from the surrounding enemies.”

Any kind of talk about humanism and consideration are moot when speaking of saving our brothers in the south and in the rest of the country and bringing back quiet to our country.” Source

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An Israeli tank shell hit the third floor of Al-Aqsa hospital in the central Gaza Strip on Monday, July 21, 2014, killing four people and wounding 16, the Health Ministry said. "All patients were evacuated and the 100-bed hospital is no longer functioning," a World Health Organization (WHO) statement said on Tuesday after a WHO team visited the site. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), guardian of the rules of war, condemned the attack on the Al-Aqsa hospital which it said had come under "direct fire at least four times”. Warring parties are obliged under international humanitarian law to protect medical personnel, ambulances and facilities, the ICRC said in a statement issued late on Monday.

On the evening of July 21, the Israelis bombed an eight-story apartment building in downtown Gaza City — an area where Israeli officials had urged Gazans to take shelter. The building collapsed as rescue crews were inside, killing more people. The death toll, at least 13, was still being tallied.

Crater where the four-story Abu Jameh house had stood

An Israeli missile leveled a four-story house in the southern Gaza Strip. It also killed 25 members of four Abu Jameh family — including 19 children — gathered to break the daily Ramadan fast together. The situation at the Abu Jameh home, where, survivors said, the family was gathered to break its daily Ramadan fast — a ceremonial meal — was at a time when Israeli military officials would have known that people were likely to be home.

Of those who lived in the house, only four people survived, three men who had gone to pray, and Tawfik Abu Jameh’s toddler, shielded by the body of his mother. The children killed ranged in age from 4 months to 14 years, and included an adopted orphan whose father had been killed in an Israeli strike.

One of the survivors, Bassam Abu Jameh, lay on a mat with a broken leg, his eyes rimmed with red. His wife, Yasmeen; two brothers; and three children, Batool, 5, Sohaila, 3, and Bassam, 1, had all been killed. “There is nothing left,” he said, pressing his hand to his eyes. “It is the end for us.”

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GENEVA, July 22 (Reuters) - Palestinian civilians in densely-populated Gaza have no place to hide from Israel's military offensive and children are paying the heaviest price, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Israel pounded targets across the Gaza Strip, saying no ceasefire was near as U.S. and U.N. diplomats pursued talks on halting fighting that has claimed more than 600 lives as the conflict entered its third week.

"There is literally no safe place for civilians," Jens Laerke, spokesman of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told a news briefing in Geneva.

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It is something of a miracle that social media is successfully reporting Israeli war crimes compared to 2009, when Israelis launched a major military campaign into Gaza and the Israeli military (IDF) prevented foreign media from entering the territory. Back then, the IDF also managed to block cellphone bandwidth, allowing few cellphone photographs to appear outside Gaza, according to the New York Times.

(Haaretz) — “The only thing that can deter terrorists, like those who kidnapped the children and killed them, is the knowledge that their sister or their mother will be raped.” This assertion was made by Middle East scholar Dr. Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University on an Israel Radio program. “It sounds very bad, but that’s the Middle East,” added Kedar, of Bar-Ilan’s Department of Arabic.The program “Hakol Diburim” (“It’s All Talk”) was broadcast on July 1, immediately after the discovery of the bodies of Gilad Shaar, Naftali Fraenkel and Eyal Yifrah, who were kidnapped and murdered in the West Bank. It dealt, among other things, with the question of how Hamas can be deterred.“You have to understand the culture in which we live,” said Kedar. “The only thing that deters [Hamas leaders] is a threat to the connection between their heads and their shoulders.” When presenter Yossi Hadar asked if that “could filter down” the organization’s ranks, Kedar replied: “No, because lower down the considerations are entirely different. Terrorists like those who kidnapped the children and killed them — the only thing that deters them is if they know that their sister or their mother will be raped in the event that they are caught. What can you do, that’s the culture in which we live.”When Hadar said, “We can’t take such steps, of course,” Kedar continued: “I’m not talking about what we should or shouldn’t do. I’m talking about the facts. The only thing that deters a suicide bomber is the knowledge that if he pulls the trigger or blows himself up, his sister will be raped. That’s all. That’s the only thing that will bring him back home, in order to preserve his sister’s honor.”Kedar is also a research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan, and in the past also served as chairman of the Israel Academia Monitor organization, which is involved in “exposing extremist Israeli academics who exploit academic freedom in order to take steps to deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.” The organization is engaged in a battle against professors identified with the left.In the wake of the publication of his words, feminist activists today sent a letter to Bar-Ilan University president Rabbi Prof. Daniel Hershkowitz, in which they decried Kedar’s “words of incitement that grant legitimacy to Israel Defense Forces soldiers and Israeli civilians to commit rape, and endanger both Israeli and Palestinian women. Kedar’s words echo expressions that treat rape as a remedial practice, although it is a war crime.”

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Michael Hoffman's Afterword:

Though it will be claimed by the usual public relations hacks that Prof. Kedar's monstrous rape/deterrent observation is "condemned by the Jewish tradition" (citing, for example, BT Kiddushin 22), there are rabbinic escape clauses which justify rape. First, the rape target must be classified as a zonah (prostitute) or a nokri (hostile alien). The supreme Ashkenazic halachic authority, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, rules that a Judaic soldier may rape this type of female POW (Yefas To'ar) when he is not actively fighting a battle (cf. Hilchos Melachim 8:3). For an explication of this subject consult my book, Judaism Discovered, p. 904.

Courtesy of Maurice Pinay— text from the Meorot theology journal of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinic School, giving permission to Judaic soldiers to rape a female gentile battle captive one time:“It is the consensus of many halachic decisors (judges of rabbinic law) that the yefat to’ar (female goy captive) can be subject to involuntary intercourse, though only once, after which she must undergo a specific regimen described in the Torah (Torah sheBeal peh i.e. the Mishnah and Gemara), conversion and marriage, before her captor is permitted further sexual relations with her…”

Dov. S. Zakheim, Meorot vol. 6: no. 1 (2006), p. 5.

(Zakheim was Under Secretary of Defense in the administration of George W. Bush, 2001-2004)

One wonders how much of an outcry this rape-as-a-deterrent observation will receive from Hillary Clinton, from those who denounced Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, and from big media like the New York Times. The Times published a lengthy, front page report on July 13 concerning a small U.S. college that supposedly was negligent in investigating the rape of an intoxicated female student.

New York Times Suppresses Prof. Kedar’s Statement

On August 4, 2014 the NY Times online permitted a passing reference to Kedar’s rape remarks. It appeared in the eleventh paragraph of an Op-Ed by Ali Jarbawi. The Times claims to be deeply concerned about a culture of rape on American college campuses, but took 13 days to even mention (much less report) on the Israeli professor who teaches at a heralded Talmudic university, who states on Israeli radio that raping Palestinian women is the only effective deterrent against Palestinian armed resistance. Prof. Kedar’s repulsive remarks deserve a separate article, and an exposé in the Times. However, let the record show that the article by Jarbawi mentioning Kedar was not published in the print edition of the New York Times distributed in the U.S. It was published only online, and in the printed International edition of the Times whichcontains only a mere passing mention of the Israeli advocacy of the rape of Arab women, which was omitted from the U.S. print edition, which still has the majority of the readers of the Times, who will not see even a passing mention of the outrageous Israeli rape-as-a-deterrent doctrine. This is the same New York Times newspaper that has the brass to presume to judge and indict Russian media for alleged bias and mendacity.

I have safely received the latest Revisionist History newsletter (no. 73 -- "Masonic America: The Mormon Branch of the Brotherhood"), and what an incredible story. I knew that the Mormons were stinkers of course, but had no idea of the extent of their stinkerdom. Extraordinary to think that they control territory, Utah, that is not much smaller in area than the area of England.

By the way, if ever my subscription runs out and I have not renewed, please, please, badger me. I definitely want to continue being a subscriber into the far distant future! – and (unless I notify you that I simply cannot afford to) it will therefore be because of inefficiency – not dissatisfaction – on my part if ever I do not renew...

Though it is being fronted as a donation to fund support for education reform, Walmart Foundation's $3.1 million gift to the Arab and Chrstian-hating rabbis of the extremist "Agudath Israel" organization is possibly a payoff to keep Walmart in the good graces of the American media and Congress, and whatever sectors of the US economy Agudath Israel may influence.Read the report here.

Friday, July 18, 2014

Top Aide to Pope Francis Doesn't Know if Jesus Would Favor "Gay" Marriage

"I don't know.I formulate no hypothesis on this." -- Cardinal Hummes

Do you remember Cardinal Hummes? He is the Pope's greatest friend in the College of Cardinals, the Franciscan who inspired the papal name "Francis," the cardinal who was by the Pope's side in the loggia in the memorable evening of the pope's election. Cardinal Hummes is Archbishop Emeritus of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and former Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy.

Hummes granted an extensive interview on July 27, 2014 to the "Zero Hora" (ZH) newspaper in his native Brazil, and his reply on sodomite "marriages" is here for all the world to see the extent to which the homosexual mafia has infiltrated the highest echelon of the Church of Rome.

Translation:

Zero Hora newspaper: "If Jesus were alive today, would he be in favor of gay marriage?"

Cardinal Hummes: "I don't know. I formulate no hypothesis on this. Who must answer this is the Church in its entirety. We must take care not to raise issues individually, because this ends up creating more difficulties for us to reach a valid conclusion. I think we must get together, listen to people, those who have an interest, the bishops. It is the Church that must indicate the ways, and there must be a way for all" (end quote).

Michael Hoffman's Afterword: These are weasel words from a "Prince of the Church" and top aide to Pope Francis. Cardinal Hummes doesn't know whether Jesus would be in favor of the "marriage" of two sodomites. Hummes' mentality reflects diabolic confusion, along with a radical agnosticism with regard to what Christ defined and taught -- that marriage is between a man and a woman (Matthew 19: 4-5).

_________________

The "Gay Lobby" won (in the Vatican as well)

Two Catholic homosexuals kissing: screenshot from the Pope's official Vatican Radio ("Radio Vatikan") website

Well, it seems the takeover is complete.

This from Vatican Radio:

Stephan Ackermann, bishop of Trier, is critical of proposals to “heal” homosexuality. There is no ecclesial backing for such initiatives, Ackermann said Wednesday evening in Saabrücken.

No, the bishop's comment is not the issue, just another symptom of what Fr. Dariusz Oko called the "Homoheresy". The problem is how this was presented in the official radio of the Holy See, Vatican Radio (Radio Vaticana): shame has been utterly and completely lost.What is the point of having a radio, a website, a communications team, if this is what comes out of it? What is the point of it all, if the Church's most senior communications source has become a completely worldly, mundane, immorality-promoting institution?

The blood of the martyrs of Uganda rises from the earth: they did not die for nothing. They refused to submit to sodomy and forced immorality, thinking of the Kingdom of Our Lord Jesus Christ. But they did not die for this accursed legion that took over much of the Church.

"Be not deceived: God is not mocked - for whatever a man sows, that shall he also reap."
Galatians 6:7

* Translation of an excerpt from the article:

Stephan Ackermann, (Roman Catholic) bishop of Trier, is critical of proposals to “heal” homosexuality. There is no ecclesial backing for such initiatives, Ackermann said Wednesday evening in Saabrücken. Not long ago the periodical “Die Zeit” included a report on doctors who advertise being able to change one’s sexual orientation, an approach regarded as a “secret trick” in strongly Christian circles. Ackermann made his statements at roundtable discussion which was organized by the Lesbian and Gay Union of Saar (LSVD). About one hundred persons were in attendance. The two-hour meeting was the first of its kind in Germany. Similar discussions had taken place, on a smaller scale, with gay and lesbian representatives, for example in the diocese of Essen and in the archdiocese of Berlin for the run-up to Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Germany in 2011.